Colin Wilson - Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience

Foreword

I am now 75, and most of my life has been devoted to a search for what might be called the mechanisms of the Peak Experience, or power consciousness. This book might be regarded as a kind of DIY manual of how to achieve it.

Let me begin with an example of what I mean by power consciousness. It concerns Blaise Pascal, and is from my book Religion and the Rebel :

After a year of deteriorating health and spiritual uncertainty, Blaise Pascal had a vision. It was on the 23rd of November, 1654. At half past ten in the evening probably as he lay in bed an overpowering sense of health and vitality suddenly swept over him, a feeling of complete and total well-being; a certainty so sudden and complete that, when he wrote about it, he headed the page: fire. The sensation lasted for two hours, and he tried to capture it on paper. As he wrote, his feelings changed no vision can be sustained for two hours and he began to feel that he had sinned for the past few years. This is always the way with a vision. The first sensation is of vitality that makes one affirm all existence, and love, love of the world, of its physical reality. As this certainty dies away, one becomes aware of the need for discipline if it is to be recaptured, and of ones lack of discipline in the past. Pascals Memorial begins:

fire

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the

philosophers and scholars.

Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace.

Pascal sewed this account of his vision into his clothes, and carried it with him until his death.

Here is another example, from Vacillation by W B Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

As on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessd and could bless.

Why did it happen? Yeats obviously had no idea. Neither have I. But I can pinpoint when I became actively involved in the subject.

Thirty-eight years ago, in 1969, I was asked to write a biography of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow had first contacted me in the mid-1960s after reading a book of mine called The Age of Defeat (in America, The Stature of Man ), in which I complained that throughout the 20th century, there has been a strong defeat-bias in literature You cant win due to what I called the fallacy of insignificance the feeling of most serious writers that life is a long-drawn-out defeat. (Or, as Sartre put it: It is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die.) Only in childrens stories and thrillers does the hero succeed in winning.

Maslow told me he was excited by this because he also had a deep conviction that human nature has been sold short by modern psychology Freud in particular and that we ought to take account of what he, Maslow, called higher ceilings of human nature.

What fascinated me was Maslows concept of the peak experience (he called them PEs) the experience of sudden overwhelming happiness, the feeling that life is wonderful; this, Maslow discovered, seems to happen to healthy people on a regular basis.

Here is a typical PE. A young mother was sitting watching her husband and children eating breakfast, when she was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of how much she loved them and how lucky she was: she went into the peak experience.

But note this: she was lucky before she went into the peak experience. The peak experience simply involved becoming aware of how lucky she was. It really amounts to what G K Chesterton once called absurd good news a sudden sense of wonderful optimism about the future, the feeling that life is infinitely complex and infinitely exciting.

Moreover, Maslow discovered that when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began remembering peak experiences that they had half forgotten about. For example, one young man was working his way through college as a jazz drummer, and he described how, at about two oclock one morning, he began drumming so perfectly that he couldnt do a thing wrong; he went into the peak experience.